Finished the stack of forms and wrote big gi-normous checks to the IRS and State Tax Board on Wednesday. I just have something against writing that check any earlier than I have to. Of course, Martin would say that I have something against starting on the tax paperwork until at least April 10th, whether we owe money or not.
But this is what you really came for. I’ve been going a little bit of spinning. From left to right: chinchilla/merino/silk, alpaca, the rest are shetland.
The chinchilla is a from Paradise Fibers. Kate told me that she gets the chichilla wool from the woman from Kingsboro Chinchilla, who harvests the wool like one would with angora bunnies. The fiber was a dream to spin. Like a box of chocolates, once I started, I couldn’t stop. The singles you see here have be plied. I have about 450 yards of 2 ply yarn. Just enough for a neck scarf.
The alpaca is from Spin Alpaca. I have about 230 yards of 2 ply here. I purchased the roving at the Gig Harbor Retreat, and immediately started spinning it on a spindle and started to do a very large swatch of the flower basket shawl. What you see here is the remainder spun on a wheel. I think my sampling was a lot more that I thought, since there’s only 1 oz of the original 2 oz.
The rest are samples of shetland that I received from the shetland class with Judith. Wow! What a difference. I have always thought that shetlands were rough and scratchy, because my only exposure to them have been those little skeins of Jamieson and Smith shetland yarns. I didn’t know what all the hub bub was about. Well, now I know. I foresee a shetland sweater in my near future. As soon as I spin through my other hundred pound of wool or so. (No, it’s really not that bad, but there is a lot.)
Okay, now I’m off to deal with Mr. Sarbanes and Mr. Oxley. Another humongous pile of paperwork and time sink. Whatever happened to that little US government initiative called the paperwork reduction act? Thank you Enron, Tyco, WorldCom, et al., you will never be forgotten.